Ode to Donna Haraway » Haraway Bibliography

Haraway Bibliography

Books

In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal–human encounters. (From U-MN Press)

About the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in “significant otherness.” In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway’s answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just “cyborgs for earthly survival” but also, in a more doggish idiom, “shut up and train.” (rev. from Seminary Coop Books). See also review by Julie Boulanger on Bookslut.com.

Donna Haraway’s work has transformed the fields of cyberculture, feminist studies, and the history of science and technology. Her subjects range from animal dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History to research in transgenic mice, from gender in the laboratory to the nature of the cyborg. Trained as an historian of science, she has produced a series of books and essays that have become essential reading in cultural studies, gender studies, and the history of science. The Haraway Reader brings together a generous selection of Donna Haraway’s work. Included is her “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” in which she famously wrote that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” Other selections are taken from her three major works, Primate Visions, Modest Witness, and Simians, Cyborgs and Women, as well as some of her more recent writing on animals. For readers in cultural studies, feminist theory, science studies, and cyberculture, Donna Haraway is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world. This volume is the best introduction to her thought.

In How Like a Leaf, a book-length interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (one of her former graduate students in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz), Haraway opens up about her private life and the gradual development of her philosophy. While Goodeve does probe for details, her interview technique is completely sympathetic to her subject, lending an opportunity for Haraway to explain herself at leisure rather than under critical fire. (From Amazon.com review) See also review in Kairos, and an excerpt

In “Modest_Witness @Second_Millenium. FemaleMan(c) MeetsOncoMouse,” Haraway concentrates on biological networks and takes a critical look at how biotechnology is constructing our bodies. For Haraway, the relationship between people and technology has become so intertwined that it is no longer possible to tell where we end and machines begin. In the book, Haraway challenges masculine bias in scientific culture and sees herself as the troubled witness of the ethical maelstrom of genetic engineering. (from KU press release)

A collection of ten essays written mostly during the eighties. With a feminist perspective and the premise that nature is constructed, rather than discovered–and that truth is made, not found–Haraway provides an analysis of the popular and scientificstruggles involved in the telling of evolutionary tales. (From Amazon.com review)

Haraway’s discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research. (From Amazon.com)

This detailed history and analysis of the work of biologists Ross G. Harrison, Joseph Needham, and Paul Weiss explores the development of organicism by each. Using Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm change as the starting point of her analysis, Donna Haraway emphasizes the role of model, analogy, and metaphor in the paradigm and argues that any fruitful theoretical system in biology rests upon a central metaphor. (From B&N.com)

Essays

The following essays are either available on the net or they are not republished in the Haraway Reader. I have also excluded from this list the reprints of her essays published in various anthologies and collections.

In this essay Haraway discusses the impact of Lynn Randolph’s art on her own thinking and theorizing. She describes the Cyborg painting: ” Randolph painted her Cyborg in conversation with my 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” providing a feminist portrait of the dangerous machine-human hybrids that populate our political, technological, corporeal, and imaginary landscapes; The painting maps the articulations among cosmos, animal, human, machine, and landscape through their recursive sidereal, bony, electronic, and geological skeletons; Their combinatorial logic is embodied; analysis is corporeal.”

This essay is a state of the art discussion of feminist cultural studies of science. She introduces the metaphor of the cat’s cradle that holds together the various strands of her work: (1) cultural studies; (2) feminist, multicultural, antiracist science projects; and (3) science studies. She also clarifies her intellectual relationship to standpoint theorists and specifically to Sandra Harding’s concept of strong objectivity, as well as to poststructuralist feminists such as Judith Butler. Finally, she extends her notion of nature’s agency. The essay includes extensive references to feminist science studies literature.

1991. Actors are Cyborg, Nature is Coyote, and the Geography is Elsewhere: Postscript to Cyborgs at Large. In Technoculture, eds. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

In this brief essay Haraway reflects on her interview with Penley and Ross. She also forecasts her essay, The Promises of Monsters, explains the influence that science fiction has had on her theorizing science, and discusses the connection between her metaphor of the cyborg and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of inappropriated/d other. Finally, she develops her metaphor of nature as a trickster coyote who resists western scientific discourse.

This interview treats a range of subjects related to Haraway’s conception of writing as a cyborg technology. She articulates her relationship to standpoint theory, and to feminist standpoint theorists such as Nancy Hartsock and Sandra Harding, as well as to other influential feminist figures such as Judith Butler and Teresa De Lauretis. She also reflects on her pedagogical practices and the influences of her graduate students on both her pedagogy and her scholarship as they relate to the social production of knowledge. Finally, she makes specific references to several theorists and texts that she has found intellectually and politically inspiring.

1994. Shifting the subject: A Conversation between Kum-Kum Bhavnani and Donna Haraway, by Kum-Kum Bhavani. Feminism and Psychology 4(1):19-39.

In this interview Haraway gives an autobiographical account of her teaching experiences at the University of Hawaii, Johns Hopkins, and UCSC’s HisCon program. She reflects on how her teaching experiences and her relationships with her graduate students informs her scholarship. Topics in the interview include the colonial politics surrounding IQ as a measure of intelligence, the relationship between identity and language, the discourse of psychology as a human science, the relationship between situated knowledge and standpoint theory, and the hope for liberation.

This interview hinges on two key themes of Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto: what it means to give a reliable account of the world and the world’s independent sense of humor. In the interview, Haraway offers one of the clearest discussions of what she means by her cyborg metaphor. She also articulates her critical view of psychoanalysis and the oedipal narrative as it informs the development of the cyborg. In many places the interview is light-hearted and entertaining.